Keeping with the ludum dare tradition, time to do a little analysis on what went right and wrong during my development this time!  Before I get started with that though, for one I’d like to apologize, normally i do this at the same time as my “100 games rated” review and best of list but unfortunately so far my review list, though not quite at 100, to be perfectly honest i just dont have that many games that really stand out yet, not enough to make a real list, so expect that some time in the next week or so as i revew more!  Secondly, my timelapse is now up, accompanied by a nice track of classical music as always, so please enjoy this.

Get on with it!

Right! postmortem! The point of this post, for starts, here’s the link to the competition page itself

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7131

What went right:

• The theme: frankly i was dreading another dreary, artys/emo theme like “abandoned” winning again, those kinds of themes are simply NO FUN for us programmers and it’s horifficly hard to get a decent gameplay idea that’s not just bolting the theme onto the story/background. (I generally rate 1 on theme when people do that myself, as just tacking it on isn’t really “meeting” the theme)
• My engine: my game engine worked BEAUTIFULLY, a few minor fixes were needed after release but having a fully cross-platform engine set up and ready did wonders, so even though my idea made me write a full entity system and isometric renderer from scratch having windowing/input/state management/texture and memory management already taken care of made the task a lot easier
• My tools: the newest version of my sprite editor (available under the “tools” link at the right) worked like a charm, it made animating the modular sprites a breeze even for a crappy artist like me, this time around a lot of people have even said they LIKED my art style!
• Time: for the first time, I was actually able to be HOME on both days of ludum dare! So this was the first competition i technically actually had 48 hours to work in

What went wrong?

• Timing: This ludum dare took place on the first weekend college is in, in the middle of one of the hottest weekends of the year in southern california so of course we had rolling blackouts all day saturday, my UPS tried it’s best to keep my desktop running but i ended up with a few hours of downtime midday, losing a good 4-5 hours of development, I ended up having to cut features due to this
• Mouse control:  The game was meant to be controlled entirely by mouse using pathfinding, unfortunately due to being down most of the day saturday i ended up having to cut pathfinding or I wouldn’t have had time to make actual levels and art to play.  This made getting around corners somewhat tricky though thankfully still do-able (wasd also works as analternate, it was debug code though and not the way the game was meant to be controlled so it’s a little jumpy)
• No way to restart: Another feature i had to cut due to time was resetting the player after he dies to restart (the levels already reset, only the player needed to reset) so i was forced to put just a simple game over screen when you die
• Lame ending: Another cut feature, I was going to make a better image to show when you get to the end and to thank you for playing but again, due to playing catchup for saturday a lot of art had to be cut, so all you get now is a blurb of text for the temporary ending
• not all evolutions have artwork:  my game actually tracks a LOT of statistics when you’re evoloving, over 2000 combinations are actually possible but only a tiny portion make visible changes due to my inexperience in isometric art that’s not geometric in nature and lack of time. There is no distinct skin/leg/ear/or fang graphics for the other features that evolve, only general body type, head type, and back type are actually shown
• needed a statistics readout window:  I really needed a window to show your current statistics, the “overall” statistics modified by your current evolution status are  attack/defense/speed/flight/poison/and vision, a lot of people had trouble in the caves because they did not kill enemies outside first that would buff their defense before starting to fight the much tougher bats and spiders inside

And to close out, here’s a short gameplay video of how it all turned out!

Tags: C++, compo, ld24, linux, post-mortem, postmortem, SDL, timelapse

Dawn of Dimension is a collaborative platformer. It was released for the compo as an empty and infinite realm of x and y. 10 days later, quite a few of you have left your mark.

I wrote a tool to visualize the entire map, with 1 pixel being 1 tile. It’s nice to see the amount of edits going on, and I’m hoping to see a lot more.

[stextbox id=”warning” caption=”CRITICS ARE CALLING IT:” mode=”css” direction=”ltr” shadow=”true”]”not much to enjoy”
“quite impressive :D”
“I wish there was more of a goal ”
“really creepy”
“PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!”[/stextbox]

</comicsans>

It is said that developers spend so much time testing their games that they become an expert playing it. Because of this I was able to secure the top spot on the leaderboards easily and held the title ever since.

I thought that no one else can dethrone me, it seems like I am wrong. 😀

I congratulated the guy for beating me fair and square. The 150 mark is one of the hardest difficulty, let’s see if more people can survive past it.

Try out and rate the original game here.
Try the post-compo version here.

Just a quick note to say that SineRider has just released a chiptune album that includes the music for my LD24 game Ninjural Selection!

You can get it here: Bleepy Bloopy EP – Ninjural Selection

Enjoy!

Hey guys,

So I just noticed this

It links to an own sub-section of LD-games on Kongregate, which is currently arranged by “highest rating”. This might explain how my play-numbers doubled in one day

It is also interesting because these rankings will most likely determine who will win the Kong-Contest. It’s a bit sad though that most of the traffic will be funneled through the top-entries.

(Note: I just wanted to share this. I present this neutrally without opinion on the validity/integrity of the “controversial” contest)

-Matthew

Tags: contest, Kongregate

I’ve just finished post-compo development of my latest mini-ld entry Ghostly Me (former Eruption) and the game will soon be available for play. It will be completely free I think.

Here’s a trailer

Hi guys, I have this bug I want to fix for the submitted version but i’m unsure if I should proceed or not.

Basically, the problem is that when the player dies and restarts a level, the difficulty of the game does not reset. It remains at a difficulty where they last died (the levels get difficult overtime). Although unintentional, this punishes the people playing the game multiple times. Newbies who couldn’t handle the difficult part get stuck with it which greatly frustrates them.

PoV’s post about the rules on bugfixes state that only crashes and typo bugs are allowed to be fixed. I just want to be sure if this bugfix is allowed and won’t get me disqualified.

You can tryout the submitted game here.

Thanks a lot, guys!

Play HERE!

Were taking this game all the way so stay tuned for the a fully fleshed out game sometime in the future!But for now here’s a quick update to the game to add some of the new features below.

Post Compo Version:
-2 player mode
-Xbox 360 controller support
-Sound!
-Enemy Flashing
-Harder Difficulty

360 Controls:
-Stick 1 Move
-Stick 2 Aim
-RT Shoot
-LT Melee

I haven’t yet decided whether I will continue working on my game, Primeval Laboratories, at some point in the future (October Challenge?). The feedback seems to be quite positive so far, but I’m not sure where to go with a low-scope XNA game, other than XBox Live Indie, a market I have been singularly unimpressed with.

Anyway, I though I would brainstorm what I might do to complete the game. Any feedback from those who have played would be great!

• Music and sound effects. These should be a critical part of the game, and I learned too late that they take time and skill to produce that I did not have. Free resources from the internet should suffice.
• A character sprite. Should be human but as generic as possible (a la Portal’s Chelle).
• A degree of player evolution so the player isn’t so static. Maybe issuing the player a new type of gun each round. The guns would receive small boosts each round (fire rate upgrades, spread, etc). This should involve some kind of choice on the part of the player.
• More variety in enemies. As much as possible. Prominent things I had to leave out for the compo game were armor plates (bits of the enemies that block shots from certain angles, have their own health), and visual distinctions between the enemies (visual guns and such).
• Add passive stat genes to the Products display panel in addition to weapons. Add an interface for saving enemies through the Products panel.
• Currently the player can only load two bots and fight against their offspring. May also include a feature where the player can load two pairs of bots and have them fight each other and evolve.
• Balance difficulty (restrict how good enemies can be on the first wave a little better)

I wasn’t too bothered by the theme this time.  I didn’t get the paralysis of the last two themes and sort of puzzled out what I wanted to do:

• In a crafty mood, want to do something involving making stuff.  No guns, no shooting this time if possible (last 2 entries were fps).
• Since it is evolution, you could craft to improve yourself.
• I wanted to use the cellshading I had been playing with, maybe I could make it look like the inside of a computer, and you could recompile bits to make yourself better?
• I’ll just take standard dwarf-fort materials and rename them to programmy stuff.

So I took off and finished right at the deadline with zero time for any polish or niceties.  It was a very close thing.  Here’s what went wrong:

BSP Level builders suck.  I’ve used them for the past two entries as well, but between now and then I’ve gotten really fast at max, and if you notice in the timelapse, the stuff I do in max is a blink of an eye compared to the time I spend in Quark.  If I want to use these libs again, I need to figure out a way to compile geometry from max.

A power blink knocked out all my machines and my kukuklok alarm, so I overslept several hours sunday morning.  Also despite being open for days, all the custom stuff I had set up in quark was gone, and quark was completely unusable.  I am guessing some file was autosaving and got corrupted when the power went out.  I had to uninstall and reinstall it.

I lost an hourish to a nasty level leak, totally forgetting that Quark has a really nice leak finder built in.

Rebuilding an entire level just to change some data in the entities is really bad.  I need a way to update just the entities (most of the other bsp engines have this).

My UI system works pretty good, but one thing that consistently costs me time is that I forget what I name the controls.  That means relaunching the tool, jotting the names down in a text file somewhere, then relaunching the game.  Each relaunch causes a full rebuild of the assets due to the messed up way visual studio handles shared content projects.

At some point I realized the names I was using for my crafting stations made no sense.  I had a compiler and a plugin builder.  I decided I’d rename them to compiler and linker, and did it where I thought the names came up.  Then later half asleep I changed one of them to assembler.  After awhile I was completely confused as to what did which, and what the name was.  I don’t even think they are named the same in code as they are in game.

I messed up my libraries and didn’t realize it till about a day in, when it was probably too late to switch.  I think I ended up using the libs from the last ludum dare.  I’ve made a ton of bugfixes and enhancements since then and just had to live without them.

What went well?  It is a much smaller list:

I used EZMuze for music again, this time a peer review early build of the new version coming out.  Got some good comments on it.

The cellshading with solid colors turned out ok, but I did get a comment about eye strain.  It is sort of a way to have lower detail and have the mind fill in the gaps sort of how pixel art works.  In the past I’ve built the geometry up then saved the textures for later, then I never had time to make textures, so my levels were just greyscale.

I’m fairly confident this will be my lowest rated entry yet.  Mainly because of the terribly confusing nature of it, but also because I had no time to normalize the audio and the mining sound is incredibly annoying.

I also had no time to play through the game without just cheating myself a ton of material (and I very nearly left the cheat in), so I didn’t realize how incredibly tedious it is to mine for 20ish minutes for the materials needed to win.  I think Eniko is the only one that had the determination to beat it (thanks Eniko!)

I didn’t have time to test the ending either, but thankfully it just worked.

If I had more time, I wanted to eventually have enemies that dropped materials and recipes.  There are actually 30-something recipes in the game, but most of what you can make isn’t useful.

I was thinking I’d have a boss as a sort of mmo style gear check, but instead of gear you’d need to have evolved yourself to the toughness and strength required to win.

Guess I’m a bit late to write a Post Mortem, but why not?

LD 24 was my first LD and even the first game jam I ever participated in – so I probably did tons of rookie-mistakes. Also went for the 72 hours right away because a) I didn’t have much time on saturday and b) I can’t compose music (ended up getting something from the NG audio portal).  When I saw the “Evolution” theme, I was kind of shocked – no idea whatsoever. So I decided to just jump right in and let my game evolve as I code it. I basically started off with the demo-swf of a simple trail-effect I created the day before – I figured I would just do a little, real simple avoider-game (where you upgrade over time) with it. I hated the idea of something that unoriginal, but I didn’t have a better one, so..

I would describe my entry viviDNA as “avoider-game meets snake”. You’re this white square with a rainbow-DNA-trail and have to hit the borders of the game screen whenever one changes color to level up (gain speed and DNA). There are enemies around you, that evolve, as well. You can either play offensely or defensely – if you attack enemies by bumping into them, you lose DNA, which is risky, to keep their numbers low. You can also focus on avoiding and use your trail to deflect enemies and “create a little base” to shield yourself from enemies. You have to survive as long as you can and level up as fast as possible in order to rack up a highscore.

What went right:

• Tons of accidental “discoveries” that lead to cool gameplay mechanics. Examples: I replaced the trail image of the demo-swf above with a rainbow-colored, 1 pixel high image. Due to the rotation, it looked like a DNA string!  Another thing: When there were no enemies and you could only steer your character, bumping into walls seemd kinda fun. So that’s actually a gameplay-mechanic now!
• Communicating and getting feedback early. I was in the #flixel IRC channel the whole time, and it really helped, not only when it comse to fixing little issues like weird bugs, but also improving the game. Near the end, someone who played the game said that “The trail is boring, it doesn’t do anything”. That is the sole reason why enemies are deflected by the trail now, which is in my opinion a core-feature of the game. It’s what makes the game unique and differentiates it from other avoider-games, makes it unqiue.
• Choosing a simple, easy-to-code game type. I’m not the most experienced programmer and doing something huge in only 72 hours is beyond my abilites. I focused on gameplay rather than an enormous amount of content, and it seems like it sorta worked out. At least I was able to finish the game.
• Choosing to use the most simple graphics possible (pretty much different-colored cubes only, there are only 3 .png files used in the game. The rest is drawn with flixels makeGraphic-command) and using the rigth tools (FlashDevelop + flixel)
• Getting sound effects from freesounds.org / Bfxr and music from NG.
• The title screen. Like how it turned out.

What went wrong:

• Not having enough time on Saturday.
• Throwing good programming practives over board. I basically coded as fast as possible in the beginning and totally regretted it in the end. If I had written cleaner code from the start, it would probably have taken me less time in the end, simply because it caused so much stupid bugs and confusion in general.
• Not getting enough sleep. Yeah, I’m not very productive when tired.
• Probably overusing the trail effect – I imagine the game lags pretty badly on older machines because of that.
• Not working with an artist – I was going for the jam anyway, so that could’ve improved the visual quality of the game a lot. Plus, not working alone makes things a lot more fun.
• The theme – My game doesn’t fit it perfectly if you ask me (very few games do, but still). There’s something that sorta looks like DNA, and you and the enemies “evolve” / level up, but that’s pretty much about it already.
• Not having a real idea of what the finished game should look like from the start – I know this is something I wrote in “What went right” as well, but it has pros and cons. While it worked out this time, it surely won’t always, I just “got lucky” I guess. Doing at least a bit more planning won’t hurt for the next game jam.

So yeah, LD was a rather fun experience overall, though exhausting. Apparently, (according to comments here on LD) some people even think my game is fun to play, which is just awesome. I’m looking forward to participate again in the future!

I decided to focus on making the post-compo version of my game more visually appealing. To achieve this, I decided to give my interfaces a… ehem … face-lift. Here are some before and after shots for your viewing pleasure.

Main Menu Interface

The screen on the lower-left shows the player the playing field. It gives them an idea of what to expect when they click the start button and it helps in making the menu less dull.

In-Game HUD

I still kept the visor concept and overhauled it a bit to make it look more futuristic. The icons on the bottom represent the number of “repair bullets” you have left.

I still haven’t uploaded the new build yet as I am still working on the other menus. Sorry about that, I was so happy with how the interface turned out that I couldn’t wait to share it. Haha.

While waiting, you can try out and rate the original game here. If you would like to check out the latest compo version, go here. 

It’s on my blog here: https://jacobwgames.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/game-time-evolution-postmortem/

tl;dr version:

Some things went right, some things could have been better, and I ran out of time to add some new features. But I had fun.

Play it HERE!

ZEIK

Zeik here, the code half of Cake&Code. This being our second Ludum Dare I had a vague idea of the kind of stuff we’d run into and knew that time was going to be unforgiving yet again. This time we did not do a warm-up game but I was messing around in flash days in advance to get back into fighting spirit!

What went right:
– I knew I was going to use Flash and had FlashDevelop all ready to go with a vanilla copy of FlashPunk at hand
– This time around I downloaded Chronolapse and it worked flawlessly to document the days
– We knew that we wanted some more unique music so we had a library of tools available before starting the jam this time
– Despite having work on Monday, we managed to finish at around 5:30am that morning
– Within the first hour or two we had a vision for a game, that vision became AvRvE
– Creating the isometric engine was not as difficult as it might have been, everything seemed to fall into place as I wrote it and extending it was easy enough

What went wrong:
– Though we learned last time that sounds take a lot of time to find/make/integrate we still ran out of time to find well-suited sounds to fill in the gaps in the game
– No tutorial level meant that the levels themselves had to ease players into the gameplay, this turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected
– The preloader turned out to be a huge problem until I realized that by assigning a value to one of my main class’s static variables from inside the preloader code I was forcing the load of all the assets before the preloader could display, after removing that assignment everything worked flawlessly
– Feature creep, as always, seemed to come from every direction; I built an overly robust level loading system, an interaction halting animation scheme, and was even planning on adding more items

What I learned:
– Sounds still take us forever to do, there have been no revolutionary advances since LD23
– Music is fun to edit, but takes forever just like sound editing does
– A weekend game jam is not the time to implement every feature that comes to mind
– Layering sprites for proper render order is not something to procrastinate on, get it done right and get it done as early as possible

Finally, I just wanted to extend a congratulations to all the participants! We’ve been rating your games and even though we’ve only scratched the surface it’s already been a wild ride, full of great experiences. Pat yourselves on the back, then give each other high-fives! Hope to see you all next LD.

CAKE

Wow, FINALLY Zeik and I have the time to sit down and write our post-mortems. To be honest, it’s been a crazy whirlwind of activity for me since LD#24 wrapped up, so neither of us have had the time to really sit down and work out our thoughts on AvRvE. Well now that I had a little more time to mull about it, I think it’s about time I crunched out these thoughts!

What Went Right?
– I struggled to find the right art direction for this game. The initial mockups for the game looked a lot like Pow! Pow! Pow! until I decided to just go all out dark. It was colorful and had great visual impact, just as I intended it to. 😀
– I’m a designer by nature, not a digital artist. This time around I actually had to sit down and draw all of our species out, as well as our character from different perspectives. For someone who typically doesnt do digital illustrations, I think I did alright.
– Having the multiple endings was fun! And I’m glad we went with a puzzle route this time around.
– I ate a lot better this weekend than I did the first LD we did. Granted, it still wasn’t GOOD, but I went out of my way to actually prepare food more often than not. I snacked a bit much though. 😛

What Went Wrong?
– I had company over for a chunk of the weekend. It really decreased my producitivity and I found myself having to multitask working, communicating with Zeik, and keeping my friend occupied.
– Despite the fact I’m really happy with out the game’s aesthetic and look came out, I feel like it lacked the kind of detailing that Pow! Pow! Pow! had.
– Level designing was something I was already not great at. But designing puzzle levels? Yeesh. :\ Zeik took a hold of it for the most part.
– SCHOOL!!! Ludum Dare happened on the weekend right after school started. Seems like it’d be an easy workload right? NOPE. Grad school is kicking me in the butt and threw a lot of work my way. So I was even more busy that weekend than I wanted to be.

Things I Learned for the next LD:
– FREE UP MY WEEKEND. Make sure I don’t have any work in the way and that I don’t have any unexpected guests. 😛
– Get BETTER food. I ate well this time, but there was a lot more room for healthier and energy-packed snacks. Also…less coffee plz.
– Do more art research and experiment with styles. I don’t want to look like a one-tricky pony, so I’m going to experiment with more in-depth illustration styles.

And of course, congrats to those that finished! 😀

Tags: SuccessStory

I added a quick debug feature to the post-competition version of Ninjural Selection – now you can edit the level as you play!

Hold down the space bar and a cursor will appear – you can drag to draw and erase tiles.

I added this in so I can experiment with level layout quickly, and hopefully figure out what sort of arrangement works best for this gameplay. It will be tricky – as I’ve written about here – but hopefully it will be possible.

Eventually I’d like to get some procedural level generation going!

Oh, and if you haven’t rated the game yet, you can do so here! 😉

> rate me
> post compo

the positive

+ i did it. my first game was made in this Ludum Dare contest. my first game

+ the feedback, the sensation of someone else playing the game, the comments. some people even completed the game!

+ i learn a lot more about Unity. this is the tool.

my recipe for a better JAM

+ sleep/eat WELL.

+ put a limit to the “get the idea” step, you can lose a lot of time in this.

+ try to get the game mechanics in the first day.

+ always reserve 4 hours of your total time for music/sounds!

+ team-up if you can!

i will see you in the Ludum Dare 25!

Tags: Love, post-mortem, sad, sadness, unity, unity3d

Here is my timelapse, more for fun than for real retrospective but, ok !

TIMELAPSE MY PAIRS AND ME

Anyway you can play and rate the game too !

MY PAIRS AND ME

I wanted to create 3D games, so I decided to learn Unity! Expect the next MiniLD entry to be 3D. I didn’t made any 3D games before (I only made not-really-3D ones) and I don’t know C#, Java or Boo (I know C++ thought), so I won’t learn it as quick as I would like, but I’ll try to.

For now, please post something you find useful for me.

Hey there!

So if you have checked out my Ludum Dare game, you’ll know that I failed this Ludum Dare. For some reason I didn’t enjoy it as usual, and wanted to quit. I eventually gave up.

I was sad about not being able to complete a game, but I’m happy for the Evolution theme to finally being used.

Anyway,  a few days after Ludum Dare, something amazing happened.

http://www.indiegamemag.com/indie-intermission-day-2-perpetua/#.UEnu_Y3N81F

My game got reviewed. I kinda freaked out when I saw that. It made the downloads of the game go from 200 to 900. Really, really awesome! It’s also my first review ever!

So because of that I decided to update the game. It took me a few days, but I’m finally done!

What did you add/change?

• I added 2 different endings. With these 2 you are actually able to exit the game.
• Hats! Unlock achievements to receive some cool hats, and play the game with style.
• Credits! Because I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own.
• Easier boss. A lot of people were stuck at this point, so how to defeat the boss is more clear now.
• Easter eggs!

Download

http://danielhaazen.com/download/mirror.php?file=Perpetua.rar

Right now the game has 936 downloads. I can’t wait for the 1000!

If you have already played Perpetua and you liked it, then I’m sure you’ll like this version even more

You guys are a great community! Thank you for that!

I finally got around to writing a mini-postmortem for my Ludum Dare #24 entry. For those of you who like reading these, the link to my blog post is http://blazinggames.blogspot.ca/2012/09/ludum-dare-24-postmortem.html .

Tags: postmortem